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Comment by gruez | Hacker News Reader

As much as I like to rake the executives over the coal for this, I'm disturbed by the trend of calling anything vaguely against the national interest as "treason". Nowadays if I hear someone is accused of treason absent any context, it could mean anywhere between "knowingly selling nukes to iran" to "lobbied for/against a policy that the accuser thinks is bad". In this case they're arguably scamming the government out of money, but that can hardly be compared to the crime knowingly aiding a known adversary.

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> In this case they're arguably scamming the government out of money, but that can hardly be compared to the crime knowingly aiding a known adversary.

If you're crippling infrastructure then you are inherently then you're most certainly aiding adversaries. You cannot fight an adversary if you cannot get goods moved.

If you're scamming the government out of money then you are inherently aiding adversaries. You cannot fight an adversary if you are penniless.

It sounds very comparable to me.

They're not aiding an adversary, they are the adversary.

>If you're crippling infrastructure then you are inherently then you're most certainly aiding adversaries. You cannot fight an adversary if you cannot get goods moved.

>If you're scamming the government out of money then you are inherently aiding adversaries. You cannot fight an adversary if you are penniless.

But if you apply this argument it quickly becomes a slippery slope. Running a fraud ring? You're depriving the security services of resources that could have been spent catching spies. Treason. Tax evasion? You're depriving the state of resources. Treason. Jaywalking? Believe it or not, treason. M̶a̶k̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶m̶o̶n̶e̶y̶ profiteering as a government contractor? Dunno man, sounds like you're a c̶o̶u̶n̶t̶e̶r̶r̶e̶v̶o̶l̶u̶t̶i̶o̶n̶a̶r̶y̶ traitor by making the government "penniless".

People are tired and demand better. It's a spectrum for sure, but crossing the line is crossing the line.

You can "demand better" without resorting to hyperboles as crutch to paint your enemies as being extra bad.

> In this case they're arguably scamming the government out of money, but that can hardly be compared to the crime knowingly aiding a known adversary.

I don't really get your argument. In this case they're intentionally crippling a capability of the Polish state. There does not appear to be any particular intended beneficiary (other than themselves), but any and all enemies of the Polish state foreseeably benefit when the Polish state's abilities are curtailed.

Furthermore, the general understanding of treason does not require aiding a known adversary - it requires attacking, injuring, or otherwise betraying whoever has authority over you.

> I'm disturbed by the trend of calling anything vaguely against the national interest as "treason".

I guess what I'm saying here is that this involves something that is contrary to the national interest in very specific ways. The connection is not vague.

If I'm an American and I arrange to kidnap Joe Biden and hold him for ransom, does that sound like "treason" to you? All I want is money. But someone might think there's an important difference between the effect I'm trying to produce and the effect I actually do produce.

>If I'm an American and I arrange to kidnap Joe Biden and hold him for ransom, does that sound like "treason" to you? All I want is money. But someone might think there's an important difference between the effect I'm trying to produce and the effect I actually do produce.

No, because those crimes typically get prosecuted as terrorism, not treason. Even leaking state secrets rarely get prosecuted as espionage rather than treason.

But an ideological belief that nothing must ever be called treason, regardless of what happened, does not make for a compelling argument that particular actions do not constitute treason. To make that argument, you'd need to have a definition of treason that included something.

>But an ideological belief that nothing must ever be called treason, regardless of what happened, does not make for a compelling argument that particular actions do not constitute treason.

I'm not sure how you read what I wrote, and rounded that off to "an ideological belief that nothing must ever be called treason, regardless of what happened". I don't have a ready definition for you to examine, but based on the examples it's pretty clear that executive and/or judiciary don't share such an expansive definition of treason as you. Moreover, aren't you engaging in the opposite? Is any crime that's vaguely against the state "treason"? [see my comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38540252]

I'm not the one arguing that scamming money from the government is treason. I'm arguing that this is a very direct harm to the state. A very close analogy would be if I somehow contrived to break every interstate highway in the US so that planes could no longer use them as runways. Here I've specifically defeated what the government has (credibly!) identified as a crucial logistical military capability. If you believe that treason exists at all, you should also believe that this is close to the core of the concept.

If another state did exactly the same thing, it would be an act of war. Is that not enough to make it treason when done by a subject of the state?

> I'm not sure how you read what I wrote, and rounded that off to "an ideological belief that nothing must ever be called treason, regardless of what happened".

Because what you wrote was "this can't be treason, because even things that are definitely treason still aren't treason". Take a look:

>>> those crimes typically get prosecuted as terrorism, not treason. Even leaking state secrets rarely get prosecuted as espionage rather than treason.

[I assume you meant to say "treason rather than espionage".]

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